‘Machinery of Death’: Gas chamber may be revived in Missouri

Gas chambers could be brought back to life in the state of Missouri, where the attorney general has indicated replacing lethal-injection with the long-forgotten and controversial means of execution before the former’s drug supply runs out.

"As each supply expires, the department's ability to carry out
lawfully imposed capital sentences diminishes,"
Attorney General Chris Koster said in a motion filed with the
court. "Unless the court changes its current course, the
legislature will soon be compelled to fund statutorily-authorized
alternative methods of execution to carry out lawful
judgments."

Only two forms of execution are permitted by Missouri law: lethal
injection and death by gas.

Missouri, like other US states with the death penalty, has been
using a three-drug cocktail to execute inmates for decades. The
drugs, however, are no longer available for executions after
pharmaceutical companies across the world refused to sell their
products to corrections departments for ethical reasons, and the
European Commission introduced restrictions on the export of
anesthetics to the US.

Last year Missouri announced plans to use propofol - the
anesthetic blamed for Michael Jackson's death. The drug has not
been used to execute prisoners in the US before, calling into
question its potential viability for lethal injection.

In 2012, twenty-one Missouri death row inmates filed a lawsuit in
the US District Court in Kansas City claiming the use of propofol
would be a cruel punishment since it created "an
unprecedented, substantial likelihood of foreseeable infliction
of excruciating pain in the course of executing the
plaintiffs".

In response
to legal challenges, the Missouri Supreme Court has declined
scheduling any more execution dates until the question is
resolved.

Koster has
filed new motions with the court, requesting that the state could
go ahead with the executions of two death row inmates, adding
that the department has only three quantities of propofol
remaining, with the oldest quantity due to expire in October and
the newest in 2015.

"The Missouri death penalty statute has
been unnecessarily entangled in the courts for over a
decade," Koster told The Guardian, adding
that "the premeditated murder of an innocent Missourian
is cruel and unusual punishment. The lawful implementation of the
death penalty, following a fair and reasoned jury trial, is
not."

A return to gas as a means of capital punishment would come at a
cost, as Missouri no longer has such chambers installed in its
penitentiaries.

Previous executions by gas took place at the Missouri State
Penitentiary in Jefferson City. After prisoners were moved out of
the prison a decade ago, it has become a landmark offering tours
of the onetime functional gas chamber.

"Its [gas chamber] use has fallen into disrepute not least in
the Western mind post World War Two. We see gas chambers as
problematic for reasons that don't need spelling out," an
attorney with the Death Penalty Litigation Center in Kansas City
Joseph Luby said.

"The gas chamber has been dismantled in Missouri, so from a
practical point of view I don't know how that could be done,"
chairwoman of the board for Missourians for Alternatives to the
Death Penalty Rita Linhardt said. "I would think that
would be a considerable cost and expense for the state to rebuild
the machinery of death," she added.

From 1938 to 1965 Missouri used gas to execute 38 men and one
woman. The state resumed administering the death penalty in 1989
after a 24-year break. Since then, 68 men - all convicted
murderers - have been executed in the state, all by lethal
injection, AP reports. After concerns were raised in the courts
about the lethal injection process, Missouri has carried out two
executions since 2005.

Back in 1995 the US court of appeals for the ninth circuit in
California ruled the gas chamber unconstitutional.

Executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center
Richard Dieter in Washington said other proposals have
recently been made for states to use the gas chamber or the
electric chair.

"It's unlikely that states would go back to these older
methods, and if they did, I'm not sure they would be upheld in
the courts”, Dieter noted.